Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineer 🚀 JOIN THE FUTURE OF COMMERCE WITH WHATNOT! Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. We’re re-defining e-commerce by blending community, shopping, and entertainment into a community just for you. As a remote co-located team, we’re inspired by innovation and anchored in our values https://www.whatnot.com/careers. With hubs in the US, UK, Germany, Ireland, Poland, and Australia, we’re building the future of online marketplaces –together. From fashion, beauty, and electronics to collectibles like trading cards, comic books, and even live plants, our live auctions have something for everyone. And we’re just getting started! As one of the fastest growing marketplaces https://a16z.com/marketplace-100/, we’re looking for bold, forward-thinking problem solvers across all functional areas. Check out the latest Whatnot updates on our news https://blog.teamwhatnot.com/ and engineering https://medium.com/whatnot-engineering blogs and join us as we enable anyone to turn their passion into a business, and bring people together through commerce. 💻 ROLE We’re hiring Staff Software Engineers across multiple engineering pillars at Whatnot — including Buyer Growth, Seller Growth, Trust & Risk, Discovery & Personalization, Search, AI Developer Tools, and Customer Experience. As a Staff Engineer at Whatnot, you will operate as a technical leader within and across teams. You’ll partner with Engineering, Product, Data, Design, and Leadership to define architectures, drive large cross-functional initiatives, and build the distributed systems that power one of the fastest-growing marketplaces in the world. This is a high-impact role for engineers who thrive in fast-moving environments and want to shape systems that directly influence millions of buyers and sellers. WHAT YOU’LL DO: - Lead the design and evolution of large, distributed systems that power live auctions, payments, search, recommendations, trust systems, growth funnels, and more. - Own ambiguous, high-leverage technical problems from inception to production — and set the long-term architectural direction. - Act as the technical lead for major initiatives, driving alignment across multiple teams without formal management authority. - Balance urgency and technical excellence, making principled trade-offs that unlock rapid iteration without sacrificing long-term scalability. - Raise the engineering bar through design reviews, mentorship, and hands-on contributions to critical systems. - Partner with leadership to identify the highest-impact investments for scaling reliability, performance, and developer velocity. - Help Whatnot scale through its next phase of hypergrowth, ensuring our systems remain resilient as we expand globally. We offer flexibility to work from home or from one of our global office hubs, and we value in-person time for planning, problem-solving, and connection. Team members in this role must live within commuting distance of our Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, or Seattle hub. 👋 YOU Curious about who thrives at Whatnot? We’ve found that low ego, a growth mindset, and leaning into action and high impact goes a long way here. As our next Staff Software Engineer, you likely have: - 8+ years of full-time software engineering experience, including experience at high-growth technology companies that saw significant year-over-year user or revenue growth. - A proven track record of leading large technical initiatives in fast-scaling environments. - Experience designing and evolving distributed systems at scale such as service-oriented architectures, event-driven systems, real-time systems, high-throughput APIs, data pipelines. - A strong foundation in backend and frontend development. You’re comfortable moving between layers and integrating systems end-to-end across a variety of languages and technologies (we primarily use Python, Elixir, J ... (truncated, view full listing at source)